Art exhibition goes online for viewing

Gary Demuth @GaryDemuth

Thursday

Apr 9, 2020 at 1:32 PM

Opening a visual art exhibition that no one is able to see has been a challenge for the Salina Art Center.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic that has virtually shut down most of the U.S., the Salina Art Center’s new exhibition, “Salina Biennial: Contemporary Art from the Mountain-Plains Region,” had an opening reception April 1 in a gallery empty of visitors.

By the time the exhibition closes on June 14, very few art lovers will have been able to see the works of more than 60 contemporary Midwest artists in person.

A solution to this dilemma came when Misty Serene, the Salina Art Center’s interim executive director, and her staff decided that if visitors couldn’t come to the exhibition, the exhibition would come to them.

Serene said the entire Salina Biennial exhibition can now be seen online through the Salina Art Center’s website at www.salinaartcenter.org. The exhibition also may be viewed on the Art Center’s Facebook page or on its YouTube channel (Salina Art Center).

There also is an online gallery guide to accompany the exhibition at https://issuu.com/salinaartcenter/docs/galleryguideonline.

“When we started planning in 2018, none of us could have imagined this would be the way this exhibition would launch,” Serene said. “This is our largest exhibition by far in the season, and there’s so much to see. Trying to create engagement and ways to get people excited during this time has been a challenge.”

This is the second Salina Biennial exhibition showcasing both established and up-and-coming artists of the Mountain and Plains regions of the U.S. The first Biennial exhibition in 2018 was established in part as a continuation of the Salina Art Center’s regional invitational, which ran from 1979 to 2002 and highlighted artists that balanced the history and traditions of this region with a larger, global contemporary practice.

For the 2020 Biennial exhibition, more than 600 works were submitted by 235 regional artists. Of these submissions, 63 artists whose mediums ranged from traditional landscape painting and photography to contemporary video were selected from a geographical area that included Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas.

The juror of the 2020 Biennial exhibition, Ksenya Gurshtien, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, said she was challenged by the task of not only selecting excellent artwork but also shaping a cohesive exhibition that attempts to answer the question, “What even IS contemporary art?”

“My hope is that the resulting exhibition attests to the robust and lively arts scene of the Mountain and Plains region,” she said. “A scene that both demonstrates a great breadth and diversity of interests and modes of working and, at the same time, shares the core preoccupations of contemporary artists working globally.”

In addition to offering a viewing of the exhibition online, Serene said she and her staff are planning several other ways to engage the public during the exhibition’s run:

• Each weekday, a new Salina Biennial artist and their work will be featured in a series of online video interviews and recorded Zoom chats, as well as interviews with community members talking about pieces in the exhibition. Serene said to follow the Salina Art Center’s Facebook page for event listings and opportunities to participate online.

• Online art lessons inspired by the exhibiting artists’ works will be offered on the Art Center’s YouTube channel beginning the week of April 13. In addition, the Art Center has made available an online form on the home page of their website for Salina students who don’t have access to art supplies needed to complete a school project or one of the Art Center’s featured projects. “They can request supplies from us at no charge, and we will coordinate a ‘no contact’ exchange so they can collect the art supplies they need,” Serene said.

• As distancing restrictions change, Serene said the Art Center plans to offer small group and private tours of the exhibition by appointment only. “We won’t know that until we see how things progress in the world,” she said. “This is all highly dependent on state guidelines and restrictions as part of the COVID-19 response.”

Other interactive events, online and/or in person, will continue to be discussed during the next two months of the exhibition, Serene said.

“We’re doing our best to be creative in how we can engage the public with this amazing exhibition,” she said.

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